More than Roy Wood, a gravity-defying coiffure undoubtedly brought on by fanatical Uriah Heep fandom - those were the air/hair guitar '70's days. I was more into Rory Gallagher myself...

A dark hair horse lurking at the back on the right is the very tall Andrew Lane, son of the art master of the day, uncommonly civilised people.

Bob Hailey is the other tutor in the pic, even made studying Latin seem fun, a truly Christian gentleman who single-handedly established footie at CH in the face of the indifference of the traditionalists.

And there are a couple of ghosts....John Dunkely, not present due to being the oldest in the year and sent up early. Geniality personified.

And the hyperbright and flamboyant house problem child Stuart Pryle, sent up early that summer.

I remember John ´Dud` Dunkley very well, he took me to one of my first footy matches, at Highbury to see his beloved Arsenal.
Unfortunately Stuart Pryle committed suicide at the tender age of 30. Very sad.

I read that he hadn't made it through the '80s - you wonder what drove him to perform the ultimate gesture of self-defeat.

Always academically at ease, he had one of those superheated personalities that went beyond standard issue premonitional-but-petulant youth. I suspect that the accompanying tension, which could potentially have been sublimated into strong evolutionary vitality, became unbearable over time. I can't help questioning whether the boarding-school experience did him a great deal of kindness on that score.

I sometimes think that there's a tacit but widely-held consensus that our newly-acquired habits, once seen as vices, are the flower of our virtue and therefore in some way excusable, forgivable, unpunishable, a sort of 'happiness' found in the knowledge that a few predestined individuals will carry the can, the burden of shame if you like, for everyone. Stuart might or might not have been one of those individuals, I'm not qualified to comment.

But I do know from experience that the last thing to be sacrificed by some people - though it ought to be the first - is their own prejudice and that others are very sensitive to that fact.
I also know that life is not worth the wasting of it. But the tragedy is that some people do exactly that. RIP

Miss Haigh was an excellent matron, I cannot speak highly enough of her. As a squit, it was thrice-weekly inspections. She alternated with a younger matron whose name escapes me but who I think is in the picture for LHB 1985/86, she was great too. I recall that she did complain slightly to us about her accommodation as it was one room with a bed in it, which she thought was rather unfortunately indicative if bringing a young new acquaintance of a gentleman back for coffee.

Is that Mr Karim in there in the 1985/86 LHB photo? Mr Torkington looks younger there than I remember him from a few years before, and more polished. Mr Hall put him into a Latin Hangman Test as 'Loquens Oppidum', but we got it.

Anyway, there was a story as a 3rd Former that some rascals in LHA had persuaded a particularly naïve Squit that he had to go to Matron for penis inspection, and he duly went to see Miss Haigh and announced the purpose of his visit.

The matron in Peele A was a terror greater than Tolkien's Balrog, Mr Jeffers was openly nervous when she was angry.

Continuing the theme of house photos I dug up my old one from late 1968 0r early 1969.
I can't remember why but I managed to get practically everybody to sign their names on the back of the picture including the staff.
To my embarassment there are some people in the photo who I cannot recall except all the teaching staff. There is a challenge out there for forum members to put signatures to faces.

It's quite strange to go back to an old photograph, which hasn't been looked at for 30 years, and have old memories flooding back. Mostly good (not sentimental) but also some less so.

Well I've signed the photo but I'm none too sure where I am on it. Most of the names, and a few of the faces, ring distant bells, but there are a few that I cannot recall.

It must have been taken in the summer of 1969. Dickie Dawe took over as Housemaster at the start of my second year, and the one person who is tragically missing from the photo is Richard Sears-Mullins who died in February 1969.

Actually, I think I must be the gormless looking one immediately behind Chris Nicholson and Miss Haigh.

With apologies for replying to a post 11 years late(!), I can say that apart from the teaching staff and myself (after a good search) I can't really identify any faces - though I do recognise nearly all the names. And it's very poignant to by reminded of Richard Sears-Mullins after all these years. I remember being assembled in the day-room to be be told of his death, though I can't recall exactly what we were told.